The creators of Siri just unveiled their new virtual assistant — and it blows Apple's version away

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, who created the software behind
Apple’s Siri, have spent the last four years building a new
digital assistant: Viv.

At TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday,
Kittlaus finally demonstrated Viv to the public — and it makes
Siri look antiquated in comparison.

Siri's problem

Let’s first get one thing out of
the way: Siri is pretty awful to use. Much of the time, asking
Siri to do anything feels like you’re just speaking into a Google
search. It only has a few functions it can do well, and feels
closed.

The main goal of Viv is to give
you the opposite feeling: to make you feel like Viv connects to
every service in your life.

The war

Kittlaus says we are the middle
of a war over who will build the best universal AI assistant. And
here are the three key factors he thinks put Viv in a good
position to win:

It’s personalized to
you.

It’s available in any
device.

“Most important”: It’s powered
by every service.

This last point is where Kittlaus
says Viv will really shine. Siri-style assistants can do 20 and 30
things (arguably) well, but Kittlaus wants Viv
to eventually do hundreds of thousands. He wants Viv to connect to services like
Uber, ecommerce, weather, and so on. In short:
any service that wants to
integrate with Viv should be able to.

Software writing software

Kittlaus says Viv will push
toward universal integrations by using “dynamic program
generation”: basically software that writes itself. Developers
will be able to “describe” or “model” what they want their Viv
integration to do, and the computer will do the rest. This makes
it much easier and faster to integrate with Viv than with other
AI assistants, Kittlaus says. You don't have to hire a whole
developer team to build and maintain your app.

Behind the
scenes.TechCrunch

Your personal shopper

Kittlaus gave a demonstration of
Viv's powers with a few e-commerce integrations on Monday.
This is what happened:

Send Adam 20 bucks for drinks
last night pulled up Venmo.

Send my mom some flowers for
her birthday pulled up Pro Flowers.

Get me a nice room in Palm
Springs for Labor Day weekend pulled up some options from
Hotels.com.

It was impressive.

Viv's weather integration.Business Insider

Beyond an app

Kittlaus’ vision is to have Viv
live everywhere: your phone, your car, your smart fridge. It will
follow you wherever you go to whatever device you happen to be
on. And you'll never have to download new apps. Once Uber has
built something for Viv, for example, anyone using Viv
will automatically connect to it when they ask for an Uber.
It lives in the cloud.

The way Viv is set up feels much
more open than Siri, and closer to the way Amazon’s Alexa
assistant is set up, specifically with the potential that
services can program an integration in the way they would make an
app — and that doing so would be even easier from a technical
perspective.

The power of the default

But there is one thing that
should worry some companies, and it was abundantly clear in the
demo: the power of being the default. When Kittlaus talked to
Viv, it consistently surfaced something specific from
his general commands.

And Kittlaus
called these companies — Venmo, and so on — “our friends” at
XYZ. No doubt when referring to these companies as friends,
Kittlaus was just being polite to partners in a beta program, but
it raises an interesting question.

Viv defaults to
Venmo.TechCrunch

Who decided that Uber was what
Kittlaus meant when he asked for a car?

This debate has a long history
with regards to things like Google search rankings, but feels
more pressing when we are talking about AI assistants. Part of
the reason assistants are useful is that they make a bunch of
small decisions for you (like which car service to book). And I’d
hazard a guess that in many situations, people will just go for
the default, for whichever service Viv brings up. Viv
would be a platform with a much larger percentage of
"I'm-feeling-luckys."

And that would give Viv,
potentially, a lot of power over the services it draws
from.